The head of NASA went to Congress to defend NASA's budget plans against …

It's possible that no NASA Administrator has enjoyed appearing in front of Congress since the 1960's. Charlie Bolden's testimony in front of both the Senate and House oversight committees for his agency last Wednesday was likely to continue that trend.

Although there was some argument over the 20 percent cuts to the Mars exploration program and NASA's commitments to the ESA, the key issue in both the Senate and House hearings was a philosophical difference over how to get humans into orbit. The legislators favored NASA's Space Launch System, known among its detractors as the "Senate Launch System," over CCDev, the Commercial Crew Development program. The two shouldn't conflict, given that they are meant for completely different purposes, but in these highly-politicized times, they do.

CCDev, the transfer of low Earth orbit launches to the private sector, has been labeled an Obama invention, an attempt to privatize space and a possible threat to the many jobs in the Space Belt states. SLS is now positioned by its Congressional supporters as a backup to CCDev, if CCDev should happen to fail.

Of course, one potential reason for failure is a lack of Congressional funding, and last year, the US House did its best to make that happen. They dropped NASA's $830M CCDev budget request to $300M. The Senate lawmakers gave NASA nearly what they asked—the final compromise was $406M, half of what NASA had asked. CCDev slowed, and new American manned launches were delayed for an extra year to 2017.

This year, NASA again requested the same amount, $850 million. Bolden said almost exactly the same thing: if we cut CCDev again, we pay the Russians $450 million for another year of launch services. So far, the US is paying more for Russian launch services than it gets from cutting CCDev. But for Congress, there may be a motivation: keep cutting CCDev and there will be no choice but SLS for space station flights.

The politics of orbit

When Shuttle was retired, political entities dictated that NASA build a rocket to launch in Florida, using solid rockets from Utah, liquid rockets developed in Alabama and Mississippi, and human controllers in Texas. The calculus was simple: large number of aerospace employees in those states needed to be kept employed, no matter where NASA wanted to go.

SLS's predecessor, Constellation, was born, lived for seven years, and was subsequently cancelled by the Obama administration after the Augustine Commission pointed out that it was unlikely to ever fly. After much acrimony the same geographic requirements were reissued, and NASA was told by Congress to build the SLS.

SLS is a massive rocket topped with a Lockheed-Martin Orion crew capsule, designed to carry astronauts nominally to a Near-Earth Asteroid some time around 2021. There's no requirement that SLS service the Space Station, as Constellation had—in fact, NASA specifically does not want to use SLS that way because it's about ten times more expensive. According to NASA, SLS will cost approximately $29-38 billion through its first test flight. It's thought that NASA would be able to fly the giant rocket once every two years to the Space Station, and only if necessary.

CCDev, in contrast, is a development partnership between NASA and several companies to build and test launch systems to take astronauts only as far as the Space Station and Low Earth Orbit. CCDev follows the Augustine Commission's "Flexible Path" philosophy, which calls for relatively small, low-cost rockets. Longer missions will be supported by fuel propellant depots, making them quicker to plan and cheaper to execute.

Accordingly, the contracting rules are very different. As an illustration, the Boeing CST-100 capsule, which is comparable to the Lockheed-Martin capsule, has so far cost only $101M and will require two years less to develop. CST-100 will also save money by parachuting down to the relatively lower-cost soil of the continental United States. Boeing's transports will cost $150-200 million for four passenger tickets to the Station. Other CCDev entrants are expected to charge even less.

All the Commercial Crew spacecraft are on time and on budget, and all seem to bear out the 1/10th cost assertion NASA made in their 2009 report.

CCDev meets Congress

Bolden spoke to the Senate in the morning and the House in the afternoon. House members, while mostly polite during the hearing, often seemed to be unfamiliar with the space topic, sometimes talking about NASA paying for Chinese rockets (NASA doesn't) and using words like "planetory" and "oreon". The Administrator was grilled about breaking revolving door and procurement laws, disobeying Congress, collaborating with the Chinese, trying to double the CCDev budget, and not answering letters from Rep. Frank Wolf. In 1995, Wolf accused China of eating newborn babies as a delicacy and wanted to be sure Bolden would not speak to them.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, one of four representatives from Texas on the House committee, said that she could not see any good reason to jump-start a space tourism industry, a sometimes selling point for CCDev. “I can’t justify to my constituents the expenditure of their tax dollars so that the super-rich can have a joyride.” Bolden replied that if he could choose from among four healthy competitors for transportation needs, the taxpayers would save money.

Only four people showed up to the Senate hearing. (Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke passionately and at length after Bolden, and was much better attended.) A heated debate broke out between Mr. Bolden and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson as she repeatedly accused Bolden of moving funds from the giant SLS budget to Commercial Crew. NASA's budget didn't actually use as much money for SLS as Congress allocated to it last year, a point that angered several people in both bodies. Bolden denied any relation between the two budgets and replied that he supported SLS more strongly than anyone else in the room.

In both hearings, Bolden stressed that he could not gain American access to the Space Station if they kept halving his CCDev budget. NASA, he repeated, needs the full amount to finish development.

The final vote on NASA's budget isn't likely to occur before the November elections. If something doesn't occur to brighten the Congressional mood before then, especially that of the Texas delegation, NASA may be forced to be fiscally creative again if it's to be able to reach the Space Station with its own spacecraft before the decade is out.